These shoes will let your feet 'feel' in virtual reality

2016 was a huge year for virtual reality. The Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR all went on public sale for the first time. All three of the virtual reality headsets provide touch controllers to show those in virtual worlds where their hands are and allow additional inputs.

ADVERTISEMENT

PlayStation VR review: can it compete against HTC Vive and Oculus?

Playstation VR

17 Oct 2016

Japanese firm Cerevo is looking to take VR peripherals one step further. The company has revealed a set of VR shoes that let the wearer feel the world through their feet. The idea behind the footwear is to provide more of an immersive experience for those exploring digital worlds.

READ NEXT

You can now talk to your Samsung fridge

ByMatt Burgess

Dubbed Taclim and shown at this year's CES the shoes look like an over-sized pair of sandals that would be impractical for anything other than virtual worlds. Accompanying the shoes are a more familiar looking pair of VR gloves that act as hand controllers.

WIRED

Instead of initially targeting high-end virtual reality devices - such as the Rift or Vive – the team behind the shoes says it has created them for Google's VR offering and expects to ship the first products for a costly $1,000 (£813) to $1,500 (£1,220) later in 2017. Cervo says it hopes to add support for Oculus, Steam VR, and PlayStation VR in the future and it has created a SDK for the Unity game engine.

Oculus Rift vs HTC Vive: VR headsets reviewed

Oculus Rift

12 May 2016

ADVERTISEMENT

Cerevo, which was founded in 2007 and currently has around 100 employees, says each shoe has three large tactile sensors, providing vibration feedback to the feet. Two of the tactile devices are located on the bottom of the shoe (one at the front and one at the rear) and the other is on top of the foot, near the toes. The gloves each have a single tactile device in them and all the products come with Bluetooth 4.1 connections. There is an inbuilt sensor to measure acceleration and also a gyroscope.

"Taclim generates the sense of stepping on the ground in virtual spaces (desert, grassland, water etc.), brings you the sense of wearing shoes worn by the virtual character and brings a sense of touch," the firm says on its website. Cerevo hopes people in VR using the shoes will be able to kick objects and get feedback on whether they are hard or soft, and by understanding the sensations their feet are feeling get a greater sense of the digital world they're in.